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I have played Bastion. The introduction and little more with s3tc lib and the rest of the game with s2tc and I have seen any difference, why s2tc is not a solution?

To be fair, Bastion is a pretty low-end 2D game, so maybe the difference between S3 and S2tc did't really matter. I think it would matter for other high-end 3D games though.

Originally Posted by petrs

Why should anyone have to recompile their textures just for Linux? (etc.)

I might be missing something here, but if one wanted to port something to Linux, they'd most probably have to recompile everything anyway and generally optimize it for the platform (i.e. use X-related libraries, switch to OpenGL if they have to, or whatever).. so why not textures? They might as well recompile textures, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle, right? I haven't ported a game to Linux before so I wouldn't know but that's what I would imagine the process to be like.

I might be missing something here, but if one wanted to port something to Linux, they'd most probably have to recompile everything anyway and generally optimize it for the platform (i.e. use X-related libraries, switch to OpenGL if they have to, or whatever).. so why not textures? They might as well recompile textures, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle, right? I haven't ported a game to Linux before so I wouldn't know but that's what I would imagine the process to be like.

See above, it might be impossible if they don't have the source textures any more. Heck, they might not have game sources either.

See above, it might be impossible if they don't have the source textures any more. Heck, they might not have game sources either.

That could be true, but if they don't have the source textures or the code anymore, then porting to any platform at all would be very difficult or impossible anyway, I think.. especially if the code wasn't there anymore.

I'm pretty sure Valve still has their source textures though, otherwise they wouldn't be making the same games with the same engine (and textures and everything). And they just ported their stuff to the Mac recently, too..

That could be true, but if they don't have the source textures or the code anymore, then porting to any platform at all would be very difficult or impossible anyway, I think.. especially if the code wasn't there anymore.

I'm pretty sure Valve still has their source textures though, otherwise they wouldn't be making the same games with the same engine (and textures and everything). And they just ported their stuff to the Mac recently, too..

Are we talking recent Valve games or proprietary games in general? Your post above suggests the latter. Valve seems to have a decent track record in not losing their sources, but the record across the industry in general is pretty bad.

BTW, Mac does support s3tc so they likely just used the compressed textures as-is.

Very interesting comparison shots, thanks for posting. I guess there really is a significant difference between the two texture compression algorithms

In that case, I do hope the patent problems get resolved soon

Originally Posted by curaga

Are we talking recent Valve games or proprietary games in general? Your post above suggests the latter. Valve seems to have a decent track record in not losing their sources, but the record across the industry in general is pretty bad.

BTW, Mac does support s3tc so they likely just used the compressed textures as-is.

I was talking about both, first the industry as a whole, and then valve specifically. I realize the industry has a bad track record, but I'm pretty sure the companies would still have the sources to their recently released games.

Interesting that mac supports s3tc, but that's to be expected since it's commercial/proprietary. I'm just saying that in order to port any game to another platform, you'd still need your sources (mostly code I mean) anyway, unless you're porting by emulating or something, or by using some bytecode based binary